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Topic: Highest OG for all-malt brew (Read 1681 times)

No, this isn't a "my barleywine is bigger than yours" thread. But I was wondering how high everyone would be comfortable pushing the limits for an OG on a beer that used no simple sugars or incremental feeding or anything else of that sort. In other words, at what point would you be concerned that the OG would be so high that the beer had little chance at finishing out at a drinkable FG, and is more likely to stall out at the "alcoholic malt syrup" stage.

Here's my scenario that has me thinking about this. For my next beer I am brewing a barleywine using an iterated mash. Basically, for a 3-gallon batch, I am planning on mashing 8 lbs of grain around 160F (for a high Alpha rest), then pulling the grain bag, and replacing it with 8 more pounds of grain. I'm hoping this will get me down to Beta rest temps (148ish), where I will hold for a long mash to max out fermentability.

I'm using 60% as a ballpark effiency, which would give me something in the 1.125 range for an OG. The thing is, I've gotten as high as 86% efficiency on barleywines using 8 lbs of grain in the mash before. If that happens, then I'd be up over 1.170 for my OG. Even with a big pitch of yeast, followed by a second active starter pitched 7 days later, I have a hard time imagining that this would finish as low as I'd want.

What would you use for your upper limit for the OG on an all-malt barleywine?

I'm afraid to think about a 1.170 barley wine. I wouldn't personally want to go much over 1.1 all malt, maybe 1.11 but I don't know about that. figure ~70% AA and your still looking over 1.030 FG. maybe with a metric butt load of hops?

My highest was 1.137 for an all grain barleywine and it finished about 100 points lower than that. Even with a high fg, it was amazing after aging an a mini bourbon barrel. I did mash at 148F for almost 2 hours and needed to pitch an additional slurry from a brewpub to shave off the last few points.

That said, if I had to guess, I would be very surprised if you would be in any danger of approaching the theoretical OG of 1.170 without extended boiling because first runnings tend to max out at a certain point and you would really having a hard time rinsing additional sugars from the mash if you aren't sparging and the solution is already saturated with sugar.